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From Good to Great Customer Touchpoints

Customer Touchpoints

BPM is implemented in an organization to improve business operations. However, organizations are discovering that the capabilities of this platform is helping them become more customer-centric as well. In their efforts to be customer-focused, brands are developing customer journey maps – identifying all points of interactions that a customer has with a brand. And then aligning their business processes to those touch points.

A customer journey begins much before the actual purchase of a product or service. Its starts off when a customer realizes a need and starts her search.  It continues beyond the purchase when she may want to check if she got the best possible price or want an exchange or a service related to the purchase. At each stage of the customer buying journey, there are several instances of customer-brand interactions. The experience that a customer receives at these touch points determines brand preference, purchase, affinity and eventual advocacy. Customer journey maps are today invaluable for customer-centric organizations.

Countless customer touch-points

Before the purchase of a product or availing of a service, a customer might visit a company website. She might have been looking up product reviews on e-commerce sites, emailing queries to the company, calling up call center number, or discussing with his friends and peers. All of this just to help her decide better.

During her purchase, her touch points are most likely to be the sales man on the shop floor or the call-center that helps him make the deal. After the purchase, she interacts with the brand at the billing counter or meets their service teams. She is likely to receive marketing emails during his journey and get ‘thank-you’cards post purchase. Let’s not forget the power of social. She could be interacting on the brand’s social media pages regularly, and sharing her experiences on her own page.

The number of touch points depend on the nature of the business and the demographics of the target audience as well. A purely online business will have more online touch points than the ones operating in brick-and-mortar. A product or service specifically meant for millennial are found to have more customer digital touch-points than for senior citizens. However, there are an average of 20-30 customer touch points across platforms that are critical for brands to manageExtending superior services at these touch points get crucial to them.

Perils of poor customer experience

A poor customer experience at any of these touch points can discourage her from going ahead with the purchase. And if she has already made one, she would provide low reviews online or ill-advice her network against it!

Maybe her feedback at a certain touch point was not taken seriously and no corrections were made. If it’s a show ticket purchased online and the tickets never turned up – poor service delivery! Perhaps the customer service staff didn’t have access to her details that was provided in their online forms earlier. Brands look unreliable in this case! Ignoring the customer and delaying her services are other bad customer experiences. The list can be long. After all, there are multiple customer touch points today!

The result? Shrinking customer size, business loss and bad reputation in this digital world. Hence, it’s critical for customer-centric organizations to ensure that allcustomer interactions are meaningful, speedy and non-cumbersome to its customers.

The role of BPM in the Customer Journey Map

BPM helps brands to identify and remove process silos that might be dampening the overall experience for customers. Product and service qualities apart from delivery times are found to improve considerably as processes are defined from the customer’s perspective.

BPM helps reveal any process bottlenecks that might translate into customer dissatisfaction. Processes can be re-architected, by referring to the customer journey mapand the value that customers get at all touch-points.

New-age technologies such as Robotics Process Automation (RPA) along with BPM further turbo-charge process outcomes and reduce response times to customer queries, hence offering customer satisfaction.

Customer-centric Decision Making

Customer-centric decisions are crucial to deliveringcustomer delight.With BPM, processes can be redefined, when required to drive customer-centricity. If processes are simply lowering costs, while delaying service or product delivery times, organizations reconsider their decisions with the help of BPM systems. Moreover, lowered operational costs with BPM can be passed onto customers in the form of slashed prices and rebates on products and services. Customers love being given such special treats!

Conclusion

In a nutshell, improved process efficiency with BPM is making enterprises more agile to changing customer needs. BPM platform helps brands to respond faster to customer queries and offer better rates. Enhanced service quality with BPM wins customer trust. Enterprises have realized the immense potential of the BPM platform and are implementing itfor successful customer outreach and engagement programs.

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